Larger than life

From Southall to Southfork is an unlikely journey, but this Asian shopkeeper's daughter is so resourceful she could sell oil to JR Ewing. Having rejected her school's advice to be a secretary, she made Asian cinema mainstream with Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice and is now to film Dallas, the movie. By Geraldine Bedell

Gurinder Chadha is demolishing a bowl of soft-shell crabs with gusto that is, frankly, awe-inspiring. The menu of the fashionable Asian restaurant (Gurinder's only stipulation was that we should 'eat Asian') is confusing, with the result that we have over-ordered, but she is undeterred. As she lays into the crabs, it is clear why her husband describes her as a life force.

She is also, following Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, the most commercial film director of her generation. This week she officially 'starts prepping' for the movie, Dallas, a $70m remake of the Eighties television series, starring John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez.

An Asian British woman from Southall, west London, might not be everyone's first idea of the perfect fit for a movie about Texas oil billionaires. It will be interesting to see what she makes of it, because all of her previous films have been characterised by a big-hearted warmth, and a more knowing tone will be required to update South Fork for the 21st century. But she is undeterred by this, too, and points out that, at bottom, Dallas is 'a big family drama, and that's kind of what I do'.

There is one obvious parallel: Gurinder Chadha is, like the Ewings, larger than life. She is physically big, bold and ballsy and unafraid. You don't feel that she's putting on a performance, as you almost invariably do with interviewees: there's nothing you have to get underneath. She chatters away about this and that, and gives me her email address and later rings up to tell me something else she's thought of. She's direct and natural and funny and enthusiastic and, while I'm sure there must be people who don't like her, I haven't met one. They probably stay at home, for fear of having their minds changed by cheerfulness.

Chadha's husband and screenwriting collaborator, Paul Mayeda Berges, says: 'Gurinder can talk to anybody: it's one of the things I love about her. People in Hollywood, politicians, someone at the grocery store: she's genuinely interested. And she's not thrown by people who are seen as scary. She was great with Harvey Weinstein - warm and familiar, and touching him, completely normal. With John Travolta she sees an Italian-American kid with not that dissimilar a background to her own. She tends to relate to people as if they're her friend.'

Mayeda Berges believes she gets her ease with people from her father. 'She and her dad had a very special relationship. He was also ballsy, funny and larger than life. Her dad never liked false pride: that was one of his big things. He could talk with anybody.'

Chadha's parents were immigrants from Kenya, although they maintained close links to India, where her father had worked for a time in banking. (The family was originally from the Punjab.) They didn't find life in Britain particularly easy: her father got a job with the post office but only on the humiliating condition that he took off his turban. Later he had a series of shops in the London suburbs of Ealing, Croydon and Walthamstow, which, she says, 'declined further and further through the Thatcher period. He faced a lot of difficulties. He probably thought he could have done something better with his life. But he had the courage to live with his choices. He had a tremendous spirit, and you see a lot of his spirit in my films.'

It was scarcely a privileged upbringing, and Gurinder was not encouraged to be ambitious by the world at large. As her father's shops ran into trouble and the Chadhas moved around, she kept changing schools. 'Eventually I got to one where they stuck me in the B or even C stream, where I could only take CSEs instead of O-levels. And I was like: "I think you're making a mistake here." But I was 14, 15, and I didn't really know how to handle it. Then I got all grade ones and the teachers were like: "We think we put you in the wrong set" ...'

When she decided she wanted to go to the University of East Anglia to do development studies, her teachers suggested a secretarial course, or a lesser university. Gurinder didn't take any notice, perhaps because she'd already developed an insider-outsider's habit of independence. 'I knew from an early age that people didn't see the different sides of me. I formulated a kind of bicultural identity quite early and I was always very comfortable with it, but I knew people didn't quite see that. So when teachers said to me: "You should do a secretarial course," I was like: "You're bloody nuts. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm not going to do that. You've got me wrong".'

Other people's readiness to dismiss her only made her more determined. 'Experiences like that, and seeing my parents struggle, made me think: "You don't believe I can do that, so I'm going to prove you're wrong. If you tell me I can't do something, that's the worst thing to tell me. And that's what I tell girls, and what Beckham's about: you can do it, you can do it better, and you can do it in the way you want.'

She did get to UEA, and for her degree spent a year in Amritsar, which would later be the setting for Bride and Prejudice. Most of her fellow students went to work in charities but she sensed that the media might suit her better. An instinctive dramatist, she describes her decision to go into journalism in terms of an epiphany. 'I remember a picture on the front page of the Sun during the Brixton riots: a rasta guy with a petrol bomb, and a headline saying something like: "The Future of Britain." And I thought: "Wow! Look at the power of that image", and I wanted to get behind the camera to make these people three-dimensional.'

She took a radio course, worked in radio and television, and claims her film-making still owes a lot to journalism. Alex Graham, the chief executive of the TV production company Wall to Wall, remembers running The Media Show, 'when this larger-than-life Asian woman came bouncing through the door with a couple of really rather brilliant ideas. We took her on to research them. My sense is that there are two types of people who manage to take on Hollywood: either the complete megalomaniacs who throw their toys out of the pram when they don't get what they want. There are quite a lot like that. Or you can do it by being like Gurinder, and bowl people over with your enthusiasm.'

Chadha recently returned to Wall to Wall to make Who Do You Think You Are? rummaging around her ancestry in Kenya, India and Pakistan, 'She blagged her way on to it, basically,' Graham says. 'I was watching my son play cricket when I got a call from her in Cannes on my mobile phone. She'd seen some of the last series, and she was ringing to tell me how much she liked it. Then she said: "And, you know, I've got a great story." I explained that she wasn't as well known as our usual subjects, like Paxman, but anyway we agreed to meet and talk about it. I could completely imagine being a Hollywood executive and finding it difficult to say no to her.'

Making Who Do You Think You Are? 'made me realise a lot of things about who I am,' Chadha says. 'My story is the story of empire.' A product of globalisation before the term was properly invented, she is grateful for the breadth she draws from her richly textured heritage. When she was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list last month, she was not even momentarily tempted to refuse it or give it back, as Benjamin Zephaniah or Yasmin Alibhai-Brown have. 'Quite the opposite. I think my ancestors would have been thoroughly pleased. One reason I got it, I think, is that I show contemporary Britain to the outside world. I'm only able to do that - my Britain is only like it is - because of the history of the last 500 years.'

John Woodward, chief executive of the UK Film Council, agrees: 'She has a much better understanding of what modern Britain is like than most film-makers.' He's known her since she made her first proper film, Bhaji on the Beach, released in 1993, about Asian women on a day out in Blackpool. 'There's something in her background and the ethnic group she comes from that automatically takes her towards making films for a diverse audience.'

She was already developing Bhaji on the Beach when she was at The Media Show. She met Mayeda Berges when the film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival, and he spotted it for an Asian film festival he was running in San Francisco. A Japanese American, with a bit of Basque thrown in, he became her husband and co-writer. Their first film together was What's Cooking? about four culturally diverse American families (Jewish, African-American, Latino, Vietnamese) celebrating Thanksgiving.

The couple live in Soho, with frequent visits to Southall, where her mother still lives, and to America. She does all the cooking and claims he can't even switch on the oven. 'I asked him to do it once so it was warm when I got home, but he couldn't work it out. He thought it was broken.' And they write together. 'Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts and you need the feedback of other people, and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down. That's why it works for Paul and me. Often I'll come up with an idea and he'll jump in and help me expand it, or find a better way to tell that story.

'We thrash out an outline, then he spends days poring over it, whereas I tend to have quick bursts of energy. He's very patient, whereas I'm more instinctive and journalistic: am I furthering my argument, getting back to the story?'

Since What's Cooking? they have collaborated on Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, as well as Mistress of Spices, a magical realist take on the immigrant story, which he directed. They also wrote a five-minute film for Paris je t'aime, a series of shorts commissioned by the producers of Amelie from 20 international directors (others included the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne, Wes Craven and Walter Salles) which premiered a couple of months ago at Cannes.

When I first met Chadha, last December, she was expecting her next project to be My Sassy Girl, a remake of a Korean film, set in New York. Then came the offer to direct Dallas. 'I wasn't that interested at first: I couldn't see why you'd want to do it now. Then the script came [by Robert Harling, who wrote Steel Magnolias] and it's very funny. It's the Dallas we know, but it's gone global. I think of it as high trash with a political edge. The joy of it is that you can take it in crazy directions and it's still believable. There are references to Enron, and where before JR would have had bent senators on his payroll. Now it goes right to the top of the White House and he's orchestrating a coup in a Third World country to get their oil.' The directorial challenge will presumably be to hit the right preposterous-but-believable note, to be clear-sighted about the characters but keep audiences caring.

'She's very good at bringing out the emotions in a scene,' Mayeda Berges says. 'She knows what she wants from any particular moment in the movie.' She has great underlying toughness and, apparently, 'a temper you wouldn't want to see'. He adds that he mainly sees this when he's driving.

At first, casual glance, Chadha's progression from Asian niche film-maker to blockbuster director has been remarkably fast and smooth. But there was a long period after Bhaji on the Beach when she'd proved that she could make a good film but wasn't seen as commercial. What's Cooking? took years to get financed, and then only had an art-house release. It might have been easy to become disheartened and accept the apparent estimation of her as an interesting director of films for a minority audience.

She wasn't having any of it, convinced that 'I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, but then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.' She was finally, conclusively proved right about this with Bend It Like Beckham, a film about a highly specific community in a particular place and time that was loved around the world. Beckham was partly autobiographical, reflecting her own efforts to manage her adolescence, 'what's the phrase? - on a need-to-know basis'.

Out of the various identities on offer to her - Asian, British, Sikh, wife of an American, girl from Southall, international film director - she has put together one that works, avoiding easy categorisation, determinedly seeing culture as opportunity rather than constraint. When she talks about her films, it's always in terms of the stories, the drama, the points of maximum emotion. But there is a serious, even political, underlying intent: 'I think the reason I have the drive I do is ultimately about racism. It's about finding ways to diminish the impact of difference.'

This week she will collect an honorary degree from Leeds University. Last year she got one from Sheffield. The citation then was 'for something like "excellence in my work showing Asian influences on British mainstream culture". And I thought that was really cool, because that's why I started doing what I do. To be honest, that's my life's work.'

Flash Back

Early life

Born in Kenya in 1960. Her family was forced to move to India due to political tensions leading up to Kenya's independence from Britain. In 1961 she moved with her parents to Britain, where she grew up in Southall, London.

Career

News reporter for BBC radio.

1989 Made the TV documentary, I'm British But ... The film focused on the Bhangra music scene, exploring identity issues among British-born Asians.

1990 Established her own production company, Umbi Films.

1993 Directed her first feature film, Bhaji on the Beach, a comedy following three generations of British Asian women on a day out in Blackpool.

2003 Made Bend It Like Beckham, her best-known film, which tells the story of a football-mad Asian girl.

2006 Awarded an OBE for services to the British film Industry.

Family life

Married to fellow film-maker Paul Mayeda Berges, with whom she has worked on a number of films.